Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

We used Unity for the game and man, it’s model importer is quite powerful! If the target model has the more-or-less correct bone hierarchy, it automatically maps the bones of the target rig to the humanoid reference avatar. If it’s not correct, you can still configure it manually. Our dragon guy required some manual setup like this and still got into the game in no time!

Okay, it’s not AAA category, but did the job. We really enjoyed selecting and putting together the final characters. Being only 2 programmers on the project we had.. hm.. let’s say limited artistic skills, so using a shared skeleton greatly reduced the time required to get our creatures moving. This technique also made it possible to try out multiple versions and choose the ones we liked the most.

There is great potential (e.g. platformer moves, melee fighting) in this approach but we found it too buggy and complex to implement these extensions correctly within the given time frame so we kept only the animations and basic controls. We shifted our focus on improving the atmosphere, juiced the scene with sound and visual effects and some nice particle systems.

We were so excited when we saw that the theme of Ludum Dare 35 was Shapeshift. This one word can mean a lot of things. The obvious meaning is changing form, shape or body but we went further during our ideation phase. We thought that the environment elements, the lighting and the music could also shift. If we could manage to get all those working in a game that would be so awesome! There are a lot of examples on character transformation in games but not as much on real time environment morphing/manipulation. Maybe this is because of technical limitations or the fact that every asset needs to be done at least twice for a game like this. Anyway, we started looking for similar games from the past for inspiration.

One of my all-time favorite game series is the Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver games. They have deep and interesting storylines, nice action/platform mechanics and at the core of the games the otherworldly environment shifting. Without spoiling anything (if you have the chance I really recommend playing those games), Raziel, the main protagonist can shift between worlds which leads to interesting puzzles in the game meanwhile keeping the experience visually diverse.

Another great example for world shifting can be found in Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams. It is a nice little 2.5D platformer game which is really hard! (I spent hours just to complete the final level. :D) The main character Giana can transform herself between “Cute” and “Punk” personas making both the environment and the music change around her. What a wonderful mechanic!

With these two the main idea for the realm shifting mechanic was on track but we also needed elements for an inviting atmosphere. There came Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and it’s unforgettable fantasy world setting. I love the visuals of that game! I wish I could experience it in VR! Take a look at this piece of art below. Beautiful, isn’t it?

So these made the core inspiration leading us to the visuals and the main mechanics of Realm Shifters. We tried to make as much element as possible morph during the shifting mechanic.

We were really tired at the end of the 3rd day but we achieved what we set up to be our goal and we are really proud of the end result. Especially because we are mainly just two programmers. 😀

We have finished our small game: Realm Shifters. At first we had a lot more ideas but we are happy how much we could actually get into the game.

“Mighty, the dragon, Berserk, the Viking and Coward, the Cow are walking in the Enchanted Forest of the Autumn Elves. Three body but one shared mind. They are collecting Magical Orbs to shift to the Abyssal Realm where they can gather the Soul Orbs to fully charge all of the Ancient Runestones to open the Really Dark Purple Vortex of Darkness. You know. Because reasons.”

In Realm Shifters you can:
– Collect orbs- Shapeshift to different forms
– Shift between realms
– Energize the Ancient Runestones
– Open the Vortex of Darkness

When I last submitted an Ludum Dare game, I gave myself an MS Paint trophy. I submitted another game, one I daresay is a bit better than the last, so here’s my reward.

that’s some CGI right there in case you can’t tell.

This LD was a blast. I spent the weekend hacking with four colleagues from Braintree and we had ourselves a hootenanny.

The game is more or less as I had imagined, albeit with a few missing bells and whistles. The last big gameplay feature where villagers build huts is still in-progress, and it could really use a GUI to tell you what’s going on. Still, remarkably complete, especially when compared to how very far short I fell last time.

What Worked Well

Knowing Unity – this time around, I knew the tools somewhat before going in. I have yet to finish a game in Unity, but I have banged out a couple of rough prototypes prior to this. In particular, the Catlike Coding tutorials were very helpful.

Comradery – While I remain a fan of the solo format, leaving home to gather with like-minded hackers was extremely helpful. Just as in my daily work, my colleagues inspire me to be better than I am.

One Fun Thing – I took Tom Francis’ advice and made a game around one fun mechanic and prototyped that mechanic immediately. I spent a lot of time making sure the fire-breathing looked and felt just so, but I think that was time extremely well spent. It’s still fun to fly around and set things on fire, even if you don’t understand what the game is really about.

What Didn’t Go Well

3D Modeling – I realized I needed better tooling to make the ork fortresses, which is where I started to spin my wheels. Google Sketchup is a straightforward enough tool, but I really found it hard to navigate. I have a license to Blender somewhere – I need to dig it up and rediscover that tool.

Visuals – These aren’t my strong suit. I cheated by going for a very basic look (one kind commenter compared it to Darwinia), but even then I spent more time on them than I ought to have. I don’t know what the solution is here though.

Other Miscellaneous Thoughts
I really had fun with this. One of my 2014 New Year’s Resolutions is to try and make a game every quarter. I have a few things I’d like to experiment with – in particular, I want to see how hard it is to make an online multiplayer game. I am going to finish up Our Man Dragon first though.

As always, thanks to the organizers for making this happen. LD is a very special event for me.

I haven’t finished a proper post-mortem yet. I want it to add some more than I did last years. But I did collect the first wave of user statistics for my ‎Ludumdare‬ game. The previous times I ran out of bandwidth and this time I used my companies servers with a higher bandwidth.

Seeing the large amount of visitors revisiting the blog I must admit being very proud!
The ‎LD28‬ weekend was during the 14th and 15th of December and the game’s release for public on the 16th. Read a more detailed explanation here: http://bit.ly/1gNTgiT

13 hours of work come and gone, minus a game of Tobago and some insane CS humans-vs-bot action.

The latest state of the game is playable here. You can burn down the evil ork, or you can choose to turn on the innocent villagers and burn down the hut.

So far so good. Tomorrow is all going to be about the two I’s – AI and UI. The eventual game idea is to have ork lairs that spawn and gather orks for raids on the village. You have to go out and hunt these lairs to keep the village safe. Over time, more and more lairs spawn, and if enough are active at once, a great WAAAAUGH will form and they’ll all rush the village. Not good.

I will be a happy man if an ork can throw a spear into the dragon by day’s end tomorrow.

I’m thinking about a new title though. Perhaps “Our Hero, Dragon” ? What do you think?